Willamette is Intel's favourite petzilla

Cat will pop its whiskers out of the bag at IDF

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"A year is as a day in the mind of Chipzilla" -- Book of Remembrances It is nearly a year since Dr Albert Yu, a senior VP at the Intel Corporation, showed an assembly of hacks a machine running a chip at 1GHz at its bi-annual Developer Forum. What a difference a year makes. When we attend the Intel Developer Forum next week, we are confident that we will see a machine being demoed that runs at 1GHz, but this time Chipzilla may open its kimono, and dispel any doubts that liquid nitrogen is making it clock. This will be the fabled Willamette IA-32 processor, which Intel has talked about for quite a long time now. It has actually demoed the processor to chip boffins already, as we reported last year. The product taped out about a month ago. What do we actually know about Willamette so far? Well, piecing together the jigsaw puzzle, we have the following: The chipset supporting it, Tahama, will include some screaming Sindie like additional instructions called Willamette New Instructions. Screaming Sindie will include 64-bit FPU instructions, but Willamette itself will support 128-bit MMX instructions. Tahama will support AGP 4X, and include 3.2GBps memory bus bandwidth and 3.2GBps system bus bandwidth. Initially, it will have 256K of on chip cache, but our information is this will rapidly rise. It may debut at 1.0GHz, it could be 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz, but at any rate its slated launch date is 1 October this year. Willamette architecture will have 128-bit MMX instructions, and SIMD (Screaming Sindie) 64-bit floating point instructions. Willamette is scheduled for launch on Oct 1, 2000. At IDF next week, which we will be covering as extensively as on the last three occasions, Intel will spend a huge amount of time on its up-and-coming IA-64 chips, we know. Meanwhile, reports that AMD will attempt to blag journalists and analysts in the middle of Intel's Palm Springs conf were discounted by a source close to the smaller company. He said: "AMD isn't clever enough to attempt that." It won't be the first time such an exercise has been attempted, however. Nine years back, on a visit to Intel's Satan Clara HQ, a Motorola spin doctor attempted to "kidnap" British journalists so they could listen to a suit talk about the Power PC platform. Some of us managed to evade capture. ® See alsoMajor Intel roadmaps ahead, please keep leftYu demonstrates 1GHz chip, talks roadmap talkWillamette, Foster details leakIntel to demo 1GHz IA-32 chip February 2000Happy Cat leaks stash of Intel futuresHard facts emerge about WillametteKatmai out of the bag